the solemn look of the rest of the countenance.

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which there was nothing the critic cared to remember now but his early failure to do justice to any of it; nor could Landor himself have disposed with greater coolness or cleverness of a subject become displeasing to him. There was just enough truth to give humour to his whimsical comparison.

Many were the points of agreement, indeed, between Hazlitt and his host; and so heartily did each enjoy the other's wilfulness and caprice, that a strong personal liking characterised their brief acquaintance.* Landor wrote to him after he left Florence, and Hazlitt replied from Rome at the beginning of April. He described himself and Mrs. Hazlitt crossing the mountains pretty well, but their journey as rather tedious. Rome had hardly answered his expectations. The ruins did not prevail enough over the modern buildings, which were commonplace things, to satisfy him: but one or two things were "prodigious fine." He had got a pleasant lodging, but found everything very bad and dear. "I "have thoughts of going to spend a month at Albano, "but am not quite sure. If I do not, I shall return to "Florence next week, and proceed to Venice. I should "be glad, if I settle at Albano, if you could manage to

...

...

* In his Recollections of Hazlitt Mr. Patmore tells us: "Of Lan"dor Hazlitt entertained a very high opinion, even before the pro"duction of his noble work, the Imaginary Conversations; ... but "his intimate connexion and friendship with Southey. seemed "to throw a doubt on the sincerity, as well as the stability, of the " opinions of both. . . . He was not answerable, he told me, for the "whole of the article on Landor in the Edinburgh Review, altera"tions and additions having been made in it after it left his hands. "... The book was one after his own heart; and some parts of it he "considered finer than anything else from a modern pen. . . . Sub"sequently Hazlitt was formally introduced to Landor at his resi"dence at Florence; and he returned to England with an improved " and heightened opinion," &c. &c.

66 come over and stop a little. I have done what I was "obliged to write for the papers, and am now a leisure man, I hope, for the rest of the summer.* .* I bought

66

66 a little Florence edition of Petrarch and Dante the "other day, and have made out one page." He devotes the rest of his letter to a Latin inscription copied by him from the monument to the Stuarts executed as a commission from the Prince-regent by Canova ;† requests that Landor will "ask Mr. Southey for his opi"nion on this Jacobite effusion ;" and, sending a kind remembrance to Landor's wife, subscribes himself his much-obliged friend.

Such few notices as thus were accessible of friends and life in Florence it seemed right to interpose before resumption of my narrative, at the opening of the year of the removal to Fiesole; and I will now only add a note or two from Leigh Hunt's recollection of Landor himself at the time. He found him living among his paintings and hospitalities, in a style of unostentatious elegance very becoming a scholar that could afford it, but with a library the smallness of which surprised Hunt, and "which he must furnish out, when he writes. "on English subjects, by the help of a rich memory." He had some fine children, Leigh goes on to say, with whom it was his habit to play like a real schoolboy; being as ready to complain of an undue knock as he was

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In another letter (dating from 33 Via Gregoriana) he wrote: "I am much gratified that you are pleased with the Spirit of the Age. Somebody ought to like it, for I am sure there will be plenty to cry "out against it. I hope you did not find any sad blunders in the "second volume; but you can hardly suppose the depression of body "and mind under which I wrote some of those articles."

JACOBO III. JACOBI II. MAGNE BRIT. REGIS FILIO, KAROLO EDVARDO, ET HENRICO DECANO PATRUM CARDINALIUM, JACOBI III. FILIIS, REGIE STIRPIS STUARDIÆ POSTREMIS, ANNO M.VCCC.XIX. BEATI MORTUI QUI IN DOMINO MORIUNTUR.

1829-35.

to laugh, shout, and scramble himself. His conversation was lively and unaffected, as full of scholarship or otherwise as his friends might desire, and dashed now and then with a little superfluous will and vehemence, when speaking of his likings and dislikes. "His laugh 66 was in peals, and climbing; he seemed to fetch every "fresh one from a higher story." Both his genius and scholarship greatly impressed his visitor. He could really fancy and feel with, as well as read, Ovid and Catullus. He had the veneration for all poetry, ancient or modern, that belonged to a scholar who was himself a poet; and showed a proper knowledge of Chaucer and of Spenser as well as of Homer. He seemed to Hunt, by his book of Idyls, to have proved himself to be by far the best Latin poet of our country, after Milton; more in good taste than the incorrectness and diffuseness of Cowley, and not to be lowered by a comparison with the mimic elegancies of Addison. "Speaking of the Latin poets of antiquity, "I was struck with an observation of his, that Ovid was "the best-natured of them all. Horace's perfection that "way he doubted. He said that Ovid had a greater range of pleasurable ideas, and was prepared to do justice to everything that came in his way. Ovid

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was fond of noticing his rivals in wit and genius, "and has recorded the names of a great number of "his friends; whereas Horace seems to confine his "eulogies to such as were rich or in fashion and "well received at court." Upon the whole, what Leigh Hunt had to say of this remarkable man, with whose poetry he had become acquainted but the year before, after reading the book that had made him suddenly famous as "one of our most powerful writers of prose," is to be summed up in a remark already referred to. He had never known anyone of such a vehement nature with

so great delicacy of imagination: "he is like a stormy "mountain-pine that should produce lilies."

II. MOTHER'S DEATH.

*

At the opening of 1829 there seemed to be less cause for anxiety as to his mother's health than had been expressed for some preceding years. Her letters had never been more frequent, and seldom more shrewdly or strikingly expressed. On the 7th of January she thanks him for the portrait of his two beautiful children; says how proud she is of what Mr. Southey in one of his books had been saying of her son; tells him of a living she had purchased for his brother Robert near Pershore, "in a pleasant country, and not far from "Ipsley ;" and adds that her daughters have been reading to her what had pleased her very much out of Bishop Heber's Journal, where his name was mentioned, and some of his poetry quoted. On the 19th of March there is a letter from her filled with county news about the Lawleys, and with what was going on at Warwick-castle and at Guy's-cliff; telling how much Sir Robert Lawley had lamented "Walter's 66 unwillingness" to see more of him in Florence, and what handsome things Lord Aston had said of the author of the Imaginary Conversations. In May she reports of her grandson Charles that he was in the fifth class at Rugby, and that the new master there was said to have wonderful influence; that the boys worked very hard to gain his approbation; and that flogging and fagging were nearly abolished altogether. This was Arnold. However, the old lady adds, "I hope the

* Heber says that the vast ruins of old cities in Upper India had brought to his mind the lines of Gebir on Masar. Ante, i, 95-96.

เ

1829-35.

"boys won't study more than is good for the health "of them, and I did not like to hear that the play"ground is deserted." That was her last letter to her son in Florence, though she lived until the October following. She had an illness somewhat suddenly in the spring, from which she never quite rallied; and through the intervening months it is discoverable that she was becoming gradually weaker, though no immediate danger was thought to exist.

Landor continued to write to her as usual. He complained to her in January how much people had beset him with introductions since his Conversations appeared, and why it was that the last series was still delayed. However, it would really be out at the end of March; and she would find that he had mentioned his kind old friend Dr. Parr with the regard and gratitude he owed him. He writes to her in June of the pleasantest weather he can remember in Italy, and asks her to tell his sister to send him various fruit-seeds. He tells her a few days later that she was not to be alarmed by anything she heard of his having been expelled from Florence, because he was back again; and the grand-duke had only laughed when he heard that the real offence had been what he had said in his book of Florentine patriots and Florentine justice, and of one of the Florentine grandees selling his old wife's clothes before she had been dead a fortnight. And at the end of July he informs her of his great misfortune in the death by apoplexy of his friend Lord Blessington at Paris, from his eulogy of whom I will take a few lines.

"When he was Viscount Mountjoy he was very much noticed by the present King, who, in bringing his charges against the Queen, said, 'I hope I shall find in Blessington as warm a friend as I found in Mountjoy.' He replied that he was afraid the